This is not a wrestling book.

Don’t get me wrong: the blurb and other cover material don’t make any pretense this is a wrestling book, but it’s important to stress this so that would-be readers don’t get misled. This isn’t a book like the Bill Watts autobiography that is about wrestling but has some diversions into religion. Instead it’s the story of Shawn Michaels’ Christianity with a backdrop of pro wrestling.

When it comes to the faith talk itself, your mileage will vary. It was never going to be to my taste, but I found it very generalised and repetitive. One incident in the book involves Michaels getting a call from Bruce Prichard about returning to wrestling and deciding that as he was in church when the phone rang, that was a sign from God that he should get back in the ring. How you respond to that proposition is probably a good indication of how much you’ll get from the book.

There are some wrestling-related passages, but you won’t learn much that isn’t already public knowledge, other than Michaels saying he and Undertaker’s legendary WrestleMania 25 bout was only officially allotted 15 minutes. Perhaps the most interesting wrestling section is where he talks about navigating the return of DX without compromising his new-found beliefs. There are also a couple of pages about the McMahons vs Michaels/God pay-per-view match, though you’ll have to decide for yourself how convincing his defence of the storyline is in the wider context of the book.

As a wrestling-related title, though, I can really only recommend it to readers who are open to the religious content or those for whom absolutely anything relating to Michaels is a must read.

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